There's a phrase Brian Jackson used when I spoke to him ahead of this RISING show that I couldn't shake walking into the Forum last Thursday night.
He described the music he and Gil Scott-Heron made together as sitting “on a higher plane,” something in the ether, beyond words, that the words then had to catch up to.
Standing in a sold-out room for RISING Festival’s world premiere of Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yasiin Bey, buzzing with that particular kind of reverent anticipation, you felt it before a note was played. The Forum itself seemed to lean in, its ornate ceiling arching overhead like a cathedral that had been waiting for exactly this congregation. Powerful!
TAMALA opened, the Bundjalung and Lama Lama spoken-word artist commanding the stage with a quiet ferocity, joined by Tenzin Choegyal, Stephen Magnusson, Erkki Veltheim and yidaki player Lionel Lauch in a set that felt genuinely of a piece with what was to follow. Protest as poetry, sound as medicine, country as cosmos.
It was a generous and wise choice of support, in my humble opinion, setting a tone of gravity and grace that the night never once abandoned.
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Then Brian Jackson walked out. Now 73, he is still a ball of energy and joy, and frankly one of the most under-celebrated figures in the history of popular music. Anchored at his Rhodes piano at centre stage, he led the band with a melodic warmth and quiet authority that made you understand immediately just how much of the Scott-Heron sound lived in his hands.
Before the show, Jackson told me the songs haven’t aged because the situation hasn’t changed, calling it “a disturbingly accurate mirror.”
The truth of that sat heavy and humbling in the air as Yasiin Bey took the stage beside him. Two men, separated by a generation and united by a lineage that runs deeper than most music ever gets to.
What unfolded was less a tribute show than a reckoning. Bey opened with The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, crouched over the microphone with a focused, almost meditative stillness, finding his footing in Scott-Heron’s cadence without attempting to wear it like a costume. He didn’t try to fill the man’s shoes. He simply stood in the same tradition, tall and assured, and let the music move through him the way water finds its level.
It would be dishonest not to note the cracks. A wayward sound mix muddied what should have been pristine, and Bey’s occasional glances down at lyric sheets grounded the evening in its own earthliness just when you wanted to float free.
There were moments in the show’s first half where you sensed him still settling into the material rather than inhabiting it. But when A Prayer For Everybody To Be Free arrived near the set’s close and he peeled off his cap and sunnies and told the room that “freedom is everybody’s job,” something clicked into place.
The potential of this incredible show, which is considerable, finally announced itself without hesitation.
Every face in that crowd said they understood. Some were wiping tears. Some were nodding slowly with their eyes closed, the way you do when something confirms what you’ve long felt in your bones but never quite heard said back to you.
The revolution wasn’t televised. But it was very much alive at the Forum.
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